Rose-Aimée Bélanger

Rose-Aimée Bélanger creates wonderful figures, full of life and humour in sandstone and bronze. Her subjects come from the people around her: her family, friends, and local characters she has met over her lifetime. They are shown in familiar attitudes, in repose and at work. Women holding bouquets, dreaming, relaxing, reading, picking berries or mushrooms, and coddling their children; men at work, or taking a lunch break. She sculpts people, with realism and candour, people of her own milieu. All her figures seem to be alive and not posed. They are tender and understanding, exuding an aura of calm and serenity. Shapes have become inflated, giving her figures gracious, yet heavy forms. Almost a paradox, she exploits this with much style and success. Her extraordinary aesthetics give the impression of lightness.

Shortly after graduating from Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, Rose-Aimée put her career on hold to devote her time to being a wife and mother. Some thirty years later, she resumed her sculpting, patiently and gradually, with great determination. To begin again in your late fifties, after a lapse of many years is rare. However, she has done so with panache. Still burning with zeal and energy, she is now into her eighties, looking forward to her next project, her next show. She is definitely a master of bronze figures.